It has been raining non-stop here in NYC today. The rain ceaselessly beats down upon the windows, those damn drops dancing. I have a bit of cabin fever even though I went out three times during the day…
Tonight as I ate my sweet and sour pork combination platter from the Chinese restaurant, I watched Nightmare Castle, a 1965 Italian gothic horror movie perfectly suited to a rainy night. It stars Barbara Steele in a dual role as a caustic adulteress and her more innocent sister. I find Barbara fascinating to watch, although I do not find her sexually attractive. Ironically, her extraordinarily expressive face is too irregular for my conservative tastes! Alluring instead is Helga Liné, whose conventionally proportioned face appeals to me more; she portrays the housekeeper in the evil castle where Barbara lives. (I wrote a long post about Helga elsewhere on this blog here.)
What a lovingly lurid poster!
Nobody could play a scheming Victorian adulteress with such venomous relish as Barbara Steele!
I think Helga has one of those perfectly symmetrical “pinup” type faces that I love.
It was a long and busy week. Besides writing newsletters and website copy for DDFNetwork, a European adult entertainment company, I am also doing a Twitter feed for one of their sites, HotLegsAndFeet, for which I’ve written newsletters and web copy for three years. Check out this Twitter feed @DDFLegFetish, because besides tweeting links to very erotic prevues of their videos, I also provide links to interesting articles, humor, and pictures I find on the Web. I tweet about thirty times a day and I try to provide plenty of entertainment for the followers, the numbers of which are, happily, growing daily.
Here is one of our newest models, the leggy and busty British bombshell who can be found on Twitter @AvaKoxxx.
Fans are already clamoring to see Ava bring their sinematic fantasies to life…fans including me! 😉
If you are puzzled by the X-rays behind Ava, that is because this particular scene took place in one of the offices of the ever-lascivious “DDF Genital Hospital” (at least, that’s the location I give to the scenes when I write them up for the websites).
Besides my daily work, which comes to several thousand words a week polished to a perverted shine in my perhaps not inimitable but certainly pleasingly accomplished style, there was an interesting development this week, namely the online publication of the second part of the Silent Porn Star interview with yours truly about my career as a smut scribe. You can find that here, with a link to the first part here as well. This time, among the various things we cover, I discuss how many women in the 70s and 80s, influenced by the aggressive anti-porn feminism of the era, didn’t exactly think smut writing was the most upstanding career for a man.
To complement that interview, I dug up this article from the October 1982 issue of GAME, which was the first porn title I edited starting in the fall of 1982. I wrote the piece under one of my other noms de porn, Lester Bloom, a name and character about whom I’ve also written a novel (The Punk Stud and His Women) and even a whole porn film (True Blue)–although the producers, as sometimes happens in XXX, left my name off the credits even though the main character sports one of my favorite pseudonyms!!
Anyway, the article shows how thirty years ago I was in the process of convincing myself, as I got more and more entrenched as a porn professional, that writing about sex could have the same emotional and cultural resonance as writing about boxing or other more mainstream topics, like stuff by famed journalist A.J. Liebling:
Click on the pic and you can make it larger to read.
To illustrate this piece, I used a movie still of Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull from a couple of years earlier; and then, to visually complement the point of my article, I dug up an 8×10 nudie still from the magazine’s files of a model whose facial expression suggested De Niro with a sex change! I have no idea who that model was. Since the great Bobby was renown at that time for greatly altering his bodily appearance to play the older LaMotta, I thought it was funny to imagine him getting implants to play a sleazy chick, which is what the opposite picture called to my twisted mind!!
This is the cover of that issue of GAME. Note: “Norbert Klinger,” noted in the rather tame coverlines (I was still learning) as the author of that issue’s fiction, was yet another one of my identities…I wasn’t “Grandma Bitch,” however.
The issue, which I found at a flea market, was a little banged up, but otherwise well-preserved!
As I’m writing this post I’m remembering how much fun it was to put those first magazines together, working sometimes until midnight in the office on East 43rd Street near Grand Central Terminal…then handing the stuff to the art director in the morning to lay out. Come to think of it, I may have found the picture of the girl first, giving me the visual basis for the article–and then maybe I dug up the pic of De Niro and dreamed up the actual topic for the piece!
Working for GAME was especially fun because I was pretty much on my own, doing what I wished with the mag–almost like doing a blog today, come to think of it!
I hope you enjoy both the Silent Porn Star interview’s peek at the Jurassic age of jizz journalism, and this sportswriters-and-sexwriters article which gives you a peek at my frame of mind as a porn scribe way back in 1982.
—————–
If you want to see Nightmare Castle for yourself, the entire movie is up on YouTube and easily located. And I found the great screenshot of Barbara seemingly gloating over her cuckolding skills here.
Irv O. Neil's EROTICA IS MY TRADE 